On November 20 at a location near Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Mass., several unsuspecting families were in for an unanticipated sight – a surprise that served as Stage Three of a major corporation’s marketing strategy for its new product. 

The surprise: a group of Pizza Hut crewmembers leapt out of a boat (“The Hutflower”) made of pizza boxes and delivered free samples of the new "Big Dinner" meal. 

In preparation for the day before Thanksgiving, usually one of busiest days of the year, Pizza Hut revealed its new Big Dinner—which includes two rectangular, one-topping medium pizzas, five breadsticks and eight wings for $19.99—by land, air, and sea. 

In addition to the sea-delivery by Plymouth Rock, the company also land-delivered meals to a line of videogamers waiting outside of a GameStop in Los Angeles, Calif., and air-delivered them (by paratrooper) to a group of servicemen and servicewomen at a Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. 

Available for a limited time, the Big Dinner is one of the company’s first ever value boxes to include a combination of pizza and side items. The Chief Marketing Officer, Kurt Kane, stated that the purpose was to feed a family of people when no one wants to have a pile of dirty dishes on the days leading up to Thanksgiving. 

For this reason, the company has dubbed the day before Thanksgiving “Red Roof Wednesday”—a day that has consistently been Pizza Hut’s busiest time of year, excluding Fridays—expecting to sell one million pizzas and 275,000 Big Dinners. To put these ambitions into context, the 2.4 million pounds of pizza the company has been expecting to sell is equivalent to the weight of 151,000 Thanksgiving turkeys. 

With Pizza Hut’s claims as “America’s Favorite Pizza,” and with such a strategically planned, grandiose opening, it seems that time will tell how effectively the Big Dinner will be able to pit the company up against its many competitors. Both Domino's and Papa John’s anticipated the same influx of hungry pre-Thanksgiving customers, but neither had any comparably new, family-sized holiday meal specials. 

To contact Staff Reporter Raishad Hardnett, email him here.